John Updike Quotes about Giving

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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

John Updike

Music, Giving, Permission

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

John Updike

Suicide, Life Sucks, Giving

Source: www.today.com

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

John Updike

Flower, Giving, Natural

John Updike (2012). “Assorted Prose”, p.207, Random House

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

John Updike

Beautiful, Reality, Giving

John Updike (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.17, Knopf

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

John Updike

Book, Smell, Giving